Former NBA superstar and all-around superdad Dwyane Wade discussed the family’s decision to turn off the comments on his 15-year-old daughter Zaya’s social media accounts.
Speaking on NBC’s “Today 3rd Hour” Friday morning, Wade was asked about a much-talked-about tweet he’d shared last week, in response to a person who wanted to send “hearts and cute comments on Zaya Wade’s IG posts” but wasn’t able to.
“As a member of her community, the LGBQ community, I wanna lift her up too!” @itsjulianking tweeted, tagging Wade and his wife, Gabrielle Union.
“For Zaya’s mental health and privacy we’ve decided not to allow the hate into her comments,” Wade responded. “Thank you for wanting to spread and send her love.”
Both Wade, a basketball superstar, and Union, a Hollywood powerhouse, have been outspoken LGBTQ allies and fierce trans rights advocates ever since Zaya announced that she was going to start living as her true self in early 2020 at the age of 12.
“You guys have been such trailblazers for acceptance,” anchor Sheinelle Jones told the three-time NBA champion and philanthropist, before asking him what made him decide to “say you can be on [social media] but I’m going to protect you a little bit.”
“Well, we have a 20-year-old, Zaire, who went through it a few years before Zaya, of jumping on social media and all of the negativity that comes with social media and the comments,” he explained. “And so we went through it once and we saw how it affected him.”
What Zaya had to deal with on social media, however, was a “whole different conversation,” he added. “And it’s way uglier.” His son’s conversations were about sports, but with Zaya, it’s “about what a lot of people don’t even understand and get,” he said.
“And so we sat down with Zaya about being on social media. Her, my wife and I ... we just want to make sure if she’s going to be on social media, if she’s going to show people some of her life, it’s going to be the people that she wants, that’s in her circle,” he said.
“And so that’s what we did and we left the hate out of it. There’s enough of that in the world. She gets enough of it. We didn’t want it to be on her comments so she can read it. We know what we are in this world. Mental health is a very — this is an important topic in this world. It’s very important for us as parents to protect the health of our kids, both physically and mentally, so we wanted to do that,” Wade added.
Earlier this year, as the power couple turned heads when entering the celebrity-packed Met Gala fund-raiser at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, they used the opportunity to explain their undying support for their trans daughter Zaya.
“Just being a father and seeing our child grow up every day, and doing what you are supposed to do as a parent [which is] is to make sure that you sit back and see what it is in life that they want to do and try to go there with them, and try to help them, mold them into who it is they want to be,” Wade said, adding that they are just “doing their part” as parents.
“And we believe them when they tell us who they are,” added Union.
In June, the proud father said that he feared for the safety of his teen daughter “every time she leaves the house.”
Speaking at the Time 100 Summit in New York, Wade said that the ongoing attack on the rights of transgender youth by state lawmakers across the country felt like “a joke” — in a terrifying way.
“This is our life — we live this,” he told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “And so when you’re out there making rules, and if you’re not experiencing this, or living this, and you are just there signing away and making laws, that’s not right.”
